Espresso in chocolate donuts

[Tammy]

I am making my first chocolate donut for a sunday meeting.  The recipe calls for espresso.  I would love to hear about your experience with these types of recipes.  Any hints or tips that will make it easier.  Thanks for your help.

Edited March 31, 2017 by Smithy
Corrected title spelling (log)

[Alex]

Actual espresso or espresso powder? If the former, do you have an espresso machine? If not, I suspect you could substitute very strong regular coffee, but someone with more baking experience could chime in on this.

 

Which recipe are you using?

Edited March 31, 2017 by Alex (log)

[Tammy]

It's an allrecipes.com recipe and your right it is espresso powder.

[Paul Fink]

what's espresso powder?

Edited March 31, 2017 by Paul Fink (log)

[liuzhou]

3 minutes ago, Paul Fink said:

what's expresso powder?

A misspelling.

[Lisa Shock]

I dislike coffee, and truly despise people who sneak coffee products into perfectly good chocolate foods, especially if they do not disclose their actions in advance. IMO, adding coffee to chocolate items is an admission that one is using inferior chocolate. (you're also adding a lot of caffeine, which can be a medical issue for your customers)

 

Also, that place is one of the worst places from which to source a recipe. Look for a source that actually tests and re-tests their recipes, instead of a swamp that allows anyone to dump whatever they want online and call it a recipe. Good sources are: Cook's Illustrated, Saveur, Food & Wine, Serious Eats, Epicurious, and the Gourmet Magazine archives.

[cakewalk]

18 minutes ago, Lisa Shock said:

I dislike coffee, and truly despise people who sneak coffee products into perfectly good chocolate foods, especially if they do not disclose their actions in advance. IMO, adding coffee to chocolate items is an admission that one is using inferior chocolate. (you're also adding a lot of caffeine, which can be a medical issue for your customers)

 

Also, that place is one of the worst places from which to source a recipe. Look for a source that actually tests and re-tests their recipes, instead of a swamp that allows anyone to dump whatever they want online and call it a recipe. Good sources are: Cook's Illustrated, Saveur, Food & Wine, Serious Eats, Epicurious, and the Gourmet Magazine archives.

Interesting. I love coffee, and I even like the coffee/chocolate combination. However, I never add coffee to chocolate to "enhance" the chocolate flavor, which is something I read all over the place. I wonder how that one got started. I have never felt that coffee "enhances" the chocolate flavor of anything. It will make it mocha flavored, which is nice if that's what you want. But if I want a fully chocolate flavored anything, I would never add coffee to it. 

 

Agreed about allrecipes. That's an "enter at your own risk" site.

 

 

[Tammy]

Thank you so much for the information and other sources.  

[Alex]

On 3/31/2017 at 11:58 AM, Paul Fink said:

what's espresso powder?

 

 

This.

 

I'm not as virulently opposed to its use as is Lisa Shock, but I employ it very selectively. And I don't use it in dishes I'll be serving to people who avoid caffeine. But then again, I don't serve chocolate to them, either.

Edited April 4, 2017 by Alex
to correct a typo (log)

[Tammy]

The group loves chocolate and coffee so I don't see that as a problem.  I'm going to make it today just so that if it is awful I can get store bought tomorrow morning.

[liuzhou]

23 hours ago, Lisa Shock said:

I dislike coffee, and truly despise people who sneak coffee products into perfectly good chocolate foods, especially if they do not disclose their actions in advance.

 

I don't dislike coffee as a breakfast drink - often I need it -  but I do hate coffee turning up when I'm not expecting it. And I totally agree that hiding it in chocolate or any cakes, sweets etc. is revolting. Especially when it's "coffee flavouring". Whatever that is I don't want to know. Don't tell me! 

[Anna N]

2 hours ago, Tammy said:

The group loves chocolate and coffee so I don't see that as a problem.  I'm going to make it today just so that if it is awful I can get store bought tomorrow morning.

 I love chocolate and coffee together. Unfortunately I don't like donuts.

[barolo]

23 minutes ago, Anna N said:

 I love chocolate and coffee together. Unfortunately I don't like donuts.

I like coffee and chocolate together and I like doughnuts, so I say go for it. 

[Lisa Shock]

I should also point out that most of Martha's recipes have been tested and work well.

[Tammy]

Well the donuts were so dense that I needed a magnifying glass to see the holes.  And they were so dry it was like having a mouth full of desert.  As for the espresso it added a bitter note that was unpleasant.  I definitely need a better recipe.

[Shalmanese]

Equal parts chocolate and coffee results in a Mocha flavored dessert but a 10:1 combo will result in enhanced chocolate flavor with no noticeable coffee flavor, much like how salt works in desserts or anchovies in sauces. Yes, it makes bad chocolate taste acceptable but it also makes good chocolate taste deeper and richer. I've generally treated it as purely optional, nice to have when it's convenient to add in but never the end of the world if you don't have it. For people who are that sensitive to caffeine, they shouldn't be having rich chocolate desserts in the first place.

[cakewalk]

1 hour ago, Shalmanese said:

Equal parts chocolate and coffee results in a Mocha flavored dessert but a 10:1 combo will result in enhanced chocolate flavor with no noticeable coffee flavor, 

Interesting. I have never noticed this to be the case. Au contraire!

[pastryani]

On April 4, 2017 at 8:23 AM, Shalmanese said:

Equal parts chocolate and coffee results in a Mocha flavored dessert but a 10:1 combo will result in enhanced chocolate flavor with no noticeable coffee flavor, much like how salt works in desserts or anchovies in sauces. Yes, it makes bad chocolate taste acceptable but it also makes good chocolate taste deeper and richer. I've generally treated it as purely optional, nice to have when it's convenient to add in but never the end of the world if you don't have it. 

Agree completely.  I was always taught that coffee enhances the chocolate flavor in cakes and pastries while being undetectable itself.  Never tried it in a ganache though... Perhaps I'll have to do a side by side taste test.  

[Lisa Shock]

Sorry to hear that it didn't work out. Advance testing is always useful. Also, I only volunteer to make things I have made before -I like to be able to plan out my schedule accurately.

[paulraphael]

I'm a little suspicious of this product called espresso powder. Espresso is almost uniquely unsuited for being powdered, since so much of what distinguishes it from regular coffee is the intense dose of aromatic compounds. These are the exact compounds that get lost during freeze drying, which is why even the best instant coffees taste relatively bland and indistinct. The marketing copy says it's more concentrated than regular instant coffee ... but how can something be more concentrated than instant coffee? The stuff is 100% concentrated. 

 

Is it made from a much darker roast? That just reflects a misunderstanding of espresso. Coffee beans roasted black do not make espresso. They make ruined coffee beans.

 

I've never been sold on using coffee to enhance chocolate flavor. But I like coffee. The best way I've found to get great coffee flavor is to infuse freshly ground beans into the dairy. For donuts, I assume there's butter; you could infuse the coffee into the butter sous-vide (chefsteps has a recipe). You get all the aromatics and all the acids, but none of the bitterness (the alkaloids aren't fat-soluble). If you're infusing into milk or cream, do it in a sealable container (like a ziploc). Use 93°C milk/cream, shake it up, seal, and after 4 minutes plunge into icewater. Don't unseal until it's room-temperature or cooler. This gets all the good flavors, including the usually elusive acidity.

Edited April 9, 2017 by paulraphael (log)

[chromedome]

6 hours ago, paulraphael said:

The best way I've found to get great coffee flavor is to infuse freshly ground beans into the dairy. For donuts, I assume there's butter; you could infuse the coffee into the butter sous-vide (chefsteps has a recipe). You get all the aromatics and all the acids, but none of the bitterness (the alkaloids aren't fat-soluble). If you're infusing into milk or cream, do it in a sealable container (like a ziploc). Use 93°C milk/cream, shake it up, seal, and after 4 minutes plunge into icewater. Don't unseal until it's room-temperature or cooler. This gets all the good flavors, including the usually elusive acidity.

 

Just to clarify (because I'm intrigued) how coarsely or finely would you grind the beans?

[Dave the Cook]

11 hours ago, paulraphael said:

I'm a little suspicious of this product called espresso powder. Espresso is almost uniquely unsuited for being powdered, since so much of what distinguishes it from regular coffee is the intense dose of aromatic compounds. These are the exact compounds that get lost during freeze drying, which is why even the best instant coffees taste relatively bland and indistinct. The marketing copy says it's more concentrated than regular instant coffee ... but how can something be more concentrated than instant coffee? The stuff is 100% concentrated. 

 

Is it made from a much darker roast? That just reflects a misunderstanding of espresso. Coffee beans roasted black do not make espresso. They make ruined coffee beans.

 

I've never been sold on using coffee to enhance chocolate flavor. But I like coffee. The best way I've found to get great coffee flavor is to infuse freshly ground beans into the dairy. For donuts, I assume there's butter; you could infuse the coffee into the butter sous-vide (chefsteps has a recipe). You get all the aromatics and all the acids, but none of the bitterness (the alkaloids aren't fat-soluble). If you're infusing into milk or cream, do it in a sealable container (like a ziploc). Use 93°C milk/cream, shake it up, seal, and after 4 minutes plunge into icewater. Don't unseal until it's room-temperature or cooler. This gets all the good flavors, including the usually elusive acidity.

 

 

5 hours ago, chromedome said:

Just to clarify (because I'm intrigued) how coarsely or finely would you grind the beans?

 

I've done two variations on this method, both for ice cream.

 

One is in Jeni Britton Bauer's recipe for "Black Coffee Ice Cream" from her book Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home. She specifies "coarsely ground coffee," which isn't a very helpful direction. I cranked up the grind size on our grinder to get something akin to what you get in a jar of cracked black pepper from the spice rack at the grocery store. Since she has you strain though a fine sieve plus cheesecloth, I decided the coffee particles had to be big enough for that strining arrangement to capture most, if not all of the grounds. The grounds steep in dairy just off the boil -- pretty close to paulraphael's 93°C.Five minutes, then strain.Good coffee flavor, and the color one traditionally associates with coffee ice cream.

 

The second method is laid out in the recipe for White Coffee Chip Ice Cream at cooksscience.com. There, you steep whole beans in not-quite-boiling dairy for an hour, then strain. The interesting thing about this method is that it imbues the dairy with decent coffee flavor minus the color. It's a cute trick to serve ice cream that looks like vanilla (or, in this case, chocolate chip) but tastes like coffee.

 

I'm not sure that either of these will capture the acids that paulraphael says the closed-container infusion does. On the other hand, I'm not sure that they'd be worth much in the context of ice cream. On the third hand, I'm not great at nuances like that.

[Anna N]

Wow. I think these are all great ideas but let's go back to the original posting.  We are talking about donuts not desserts for the Gramercy Tavern.   I think espresso powder will work fine to meet the OP's requirement.  I have used it many times for snacks, cookies and cakes.  It does the job. 

Edited April 9, 2017 by Anna N
Typo (log)

[paulraphael]

On 4/9/2017 at 7:46 AM, chromedome said:

Just to clarify (because I'm intrigued) how coarsely or finely would you grind the beans?

 

Coarse, like for French Press, or even coarser. I don't think it has to be precise with longer extractions like this, but a fine grind would probably overextract and be bitter, and you'd have a much harder time straining the grinds out. If you use the coarsest setting on a non-espresso burr grinder, you should be able to strain it all out with a chinois.

[paulraphael]

On 4/9/2017 at 1:05 PM, Dave the Cook said:

 

 

I've done two variations on this method, both for ice cream.

 

One is in Jeni Britton Bauer's recipe for "Black Coffee Ice Cream" from her book Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home. She specifies "coarsely ground coffee," which isn't a very helpful direction. I cranked up the grind size on our grinder to get something akin to what you get in a jar of cracked black pepper from the spice rack at the grocery store. Since she has you strain though a fine sieve plus cheesecloth, I decided the coffee particles had to be big enough for that strining arrangement to capture most, if not all of the grounds. The grounds steep in dairy just off the boil -- pretty close to paulraphael's 93°C.Five minutes, then strain.Good coffee flavor, and the color one traditionally associates with coffee ice cream.

 

The second method is laid out in the recipe for White Coffee Chip Ice Cream at cooksscience.com. There, you steep whole beans in not-quite-boiling dairy for an hour, then strain. The interesting thing about this method is that it imbues the dairy with decent coffee flavor minus the color. It's a cute trick to serve ice cream that looks like vanilla (or, in this case, chocolate chip) but tastes like coffee.

 

I'm not sure that either of these will capture the acids that paulraphael says the closed-container infusion does. On the other hand, I'm not sure that they'd be worth much in the context of ice cream. On the third hand, I'm not great at nuances like that.

 

Jeni's method sounds pretty close to mine, although I seal it up before chilling it, and don't find the cheesecloth to be necessary (but it might help you squeeze some of the last drops of coffee out of the grounds). IME 5 minutes is slightly long, and extracts more bitterness than I'm after. But this is the kind of thing that you have to experiment to find where your tastes are, and it's going to be dependent on the coffee itself to some degree.

 

Boiling the whole beans is a new one to me. Some people do overnight cold extractions with whole beans. I'm not a big fan of cold extraction generally, because along with reducing bitterness it reduces acidity and some of the fruitier aromatics. I think the results are bland (but it's probably a great bet if you're forced to use lousy, over-roasted beans).

 

Getting good acidity requires coffee beans that have plenty of that flavor to begin with, and even so, it's probably going to be muted by the sugar and the dairy. In my last few batches of coffee ice cream I've compensated by adding a few ml of sherry vinegar.